When you precommit to reading, you will read!
Currently Reading
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Political Order and Political Decay, Fukuyama
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The Making of the Atomic Bomb — Richard Rhodes
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How to Think Like a Roman Emperor — Donald Robertson
- A refresher to Marcus Aurelius and stoicism in Roman history.
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The Design of Everyday Things — Don Norman
- Limelight of industrial design, he practiced Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at Apple before it was a word.
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Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman
- Against Rational Choice Theory … when do we make split-second judgements, when do we halt autopilot and reason?
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The Everything Store, Jeff Bezos — Brad Stone
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Superfreakonomics
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Man’s Search for Meaning
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Can’t Hurt Me
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Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela
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The Creative Act
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Napoleon’s Art of War
Read
- Steppenwolf — Herman Hesse
- Hard Truths to Keep Singapore Going — Lee Kwan Yew
- The True Believer — Hoffer
- Games People Play — Eric Berne
- Siddartha — Herman Hesse
- The Metamorphosis — Kafka
- The Alchemist — Paulo Cohelo
- The Origins of Political Order — Francis Fukuyama (26 Jul 2024)
- Brave New World — Aldous Huxley (9 Jul 2024)
- Principles for the Changing World Order — Ray Dalio (7 Jul 2024)
- What We Owe The Future — William MacAskill (3 Jul 2024)
- 21 Lessons for the 21st Century — Yuval Noah Harari (26 Jun 2024)
- Life, the Universe and Everything (Hitchhiker’s 3) — Douglas Adams (19 Jun 2024)
- Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Hitchhiker’s 2) — Douglas Adams (15 Jun 2024)
- Elon Musk — Ashlee Vance (12 Jun 2024)
- The Myth of Sisyphus — Albert Camus (31 May 2024)
- Summary — Life is absurd! We want reasons and meaning, but we get an endlessly chaotic universe — this paradox is the Absurd. If life has no universal meaning, should you kill yourself? No, Camus argues, we must revolt against death and construct our own meaning. We must enjoy the precious little time left to do whatever we please — or, carpe diem. Without universal nature, human rules are not moral punishments to blame but consequences to accept. Sisyphus is not miserable. His pointless struggle to push a rock up a hill is really his happy defiance against God — his very own choice of meaning.
- Review — Camus had 1000 years of Christian political dogma to reject; today, existentialism seems obvious. His insistence on the ‘absurd’ makes him disavow universal meaning, but he also downplays human-constructed meaning, — like markets, technology, societies, family, etc — which is incorrect …
- Public Administration Singapore-Style, Jon Quah (27 May 2024)
- Norweigan Wood — Murakami (26 May 2024)
- CS229 Machine Learning — Andrew Ng & Tengyu Ma (15 May 2024)
- Creativity — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (27 Apr 2024)
- The Outsider — Albert Camus (24 Apr 2024)
- Leonardo Da Vinci — Walter Issacson (20 Apr 2024)
- Creative Selection — Ken Kocienda (12 Apr 2024)
- How did an Apple Principal Engineer design the iPhone?
- Dune 2 — Frank Herbert (10 Apr 2024)
- From Third World to First: The Singapore Story — Lee Kwan Yew’s memoirs (5 Apr 2024)
- The Three-Body Problem — Cixin Liu (1 Apr 2024)
- Foundation 3 — Issac Asimov (9 Jan 2024)
- Foundation 2 — Issac Asimov (7 Jan 2024)
- Review — A gripping sci-fi tale of man’s return from nuclear tech to farming across the Galaxy, and the Foundation against it. Stokes imagination of an intergalactic future, giving satisfying just-so deductions of politics and war that historians despise and engineers adore.
- Reflection — I’m starting to love sci-fi for their stoic ‘View from Above’ — on a cosmic scale, your actions matter little; but that’s no reason to despair! The Universe is majestic and divine, and you’re so lucky to be a speck of that oneness, so maybe forgive that friend who insulted your beliefs. Maybe your cold feet on a foggy San Francisco morning, at a cosmic scale, is simply ok — no reason to curse weather.
- Freakonomics — Steven Levitt (24 Dec)
- Foundation 1 — Issac Asimov (10 Dec)
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy 1 — Douglas Adams (4 Dec)
- Elon Musk — Walter Issacson (3 Dec)
- Notes on Elon: His biographies reek of lurid superfluous detail, as rich person drama sells. Like historians, they piece together a puzzle and hear all views, but lacking a thorough logic of why and how his businesses work, they resort to syllogisms, sensational anecdotes and he-said-she-said. In that respect, his TED interview is logically clearer and veers off less tangents. Of a man who tirelessly aims to transcend and suffer for a wider humanity, books obsessing over Elon’s cult of personality miss the point quite pitifully.
- Elon’s own words show it better than his biographers’—he’s as technical as they come, dodges reporters prying for manic-depressive tabloid gossip, and obsesses over unbeatable process and execution to get it done. Vance and Isaacson wanted a mythical strongman when really primary sources—his process, patents, line of thinking, emails—reveal far more to readers who endeavor to name Musk on their List of Influences upon becoming famous.
- Anything attempting a serious study of Musk should avert their eyes.
- Sapiens — Yuval Harari (1 Dec)
- Breakfast at Tiffany’s — Truman Capote (25 Nov)
- Steve Jobs — Walter Isaacson (10 Nov)
- Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow — Gabrielle Zevin (9 Nov)
- Zero to One — Peter Thiel (10 Oct)
- Ultralearning — Scott Young (2 Oct)
- When We Cease to Understand the World — Benjamin Labatut (15 Aug)
- Natural Language Processing with Transformers — Lewis Tunstall (2 Aug)
- Dune 1 — Frank Herbert (19 Jul)
- Natural Language Processing with PyTorch — Delip Rao (16 Jul)